How The Digest System Works
Each case published in a West reporter is evaluated by an editor who identifies the points of law cited or explained in the case. The editor places the summaries of the points of law covered in the case at the beginning of the case. These summaries are usually a paragraph long, and are called headnotes. Each headnote is then assigned a topic and key number. The headnotes are arranged according to their topic and key number in multi-volume sets of books called Digests. A digest serves as a subject index to the case law published in West reporters. Headnotes are merely editorial guides to the points of law discussed or used in the cases, and the headnotes themselves are not legal authority.
West publishes West's Analysis of American Law, which is a complete guide to the topic and key number system, and it is revised periodically.
Read more about this topic: West American Digest System
Famous quotes containing the words digest, system and/or works:
“The eating of a MacDonald’s meal is like the reading of Reader’s Digest—small, easily digested, carefully processed, carefully cut down, abridged. Reader’s Digest gives us knowledge that is easily compartmentalized, simplified, ideologically sound.”
—Clive Bloom, British educator. “MacDonald’s Man Meets Reader’s Digest,” Readings in Popular Culture: Trivial Pursuits?, St. Martin’s Press (1990)
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)